Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the production of a documentary made by the anthropologist and the filmmakers, together with the social actors’ visual contributions. It aims to be a democratic space exploring class struggle, and the dialectical relation between global capitalistic forces and local labour.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the existent literature on collaboration between filmmakers and anthropologists, the paper analyses the making of Biographies of Struggle, a collaborative documentary (which a brief excerpt will be shown during the presentation) shot in 2014 during the TK-AST industrial disputes, which concerned 550 redundancies and lead to forty-five consecutive days of strike.

Outside the gate in the factory forecourt, the workers overstepped the boundary of the protected production sphere and filled the public space, "to transform an economic struggle into a political one" (Farocki 2002). The best way to capture this "multiplicity in movement" (Lazzarato 2009) was through visual media, using raw footage as a series of fieldwork notes, and archival material to be further investigated.

The documentary, placed between art and documentation, aims to channel art's symbolic capital towards the construction of anthropological knowledge: its agency (Gell 1998) takes place on a mutual basis, in a mutual "language" shaped by the agent and the recipients. Born from the collaboration between two local filmmakers and the anthropologist, the documentary capitalizes on the workers' search for visibility for their cause, thus becoming a gatekeeper in their lives, producing invaluable methodological and theoretical fieldwork data. The filmmaker's ability of shaping a visual language and the anthropologist's research skills merged with social actors' own images of symbolic reproduction (recorded with their own smartphones cameras and included in the final editing) producing a multi-angled representation of working-class struggle, serving as pedagogical tool able to speak also to a larger audience outside the academia.